The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent the work is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Rotating storage devices include optical disc drives and hard disk drives. Both optical disc drives and hard disk drives generally include a spindle motor that rotates an optical disk or one or more platters, respectively, to a relatively constant operating speed for reading and/or writing. When operating, the spindle motors tend to consume relatively high power. Since rotating storage devices may be included in portable computing devices, power consumption of the rotating storage device may be a relatively important performance consideration.
Conventional rotating storage devices tend to operate in two modes. When in an operating mode, the spindle motor maintains the speed of the optical disc or platter at a predetermined speed. When shut down, the optical disc or platter is not rotated. Additional performance considerations of rotating storage devices include latency when accessing data. When attempting to read or write data to the rotating storage device that is shut down, the spindle motor must spin up the optical disc or platter, regulate the speed, and then initiate read or write access. These operations delay reading and/or writing operations.